” …As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent….

…Robert Promm, Apple’s controller in the mid-1990s, called the strategy “the worst-kept secret in Europe.”…

…However, tax experts say that strategies like the Double Irish help explain how Apple has managed to keep its international taxes to 3.2 percent of foreign profits last year, to 2.2 percent in 2010, and in the single digits for the last half-decade, according to the company’s corporate filings. ”

Getting depressed that such an awesome company refuses to pay the same tax rate as all of us? Well, a new study found that in fact, corporate tax dodging has gone so out of control that 25 major U.S. corporations last year paid their chief executives more than they paid Uncle Sam in federal income taxes. They researched 100 U.S. corporations that shelled out the most last year in CEO compensation. 25 of them the bill for chief executive compensation actually ran higher than the company’s entire federal corporate income tax bill. BAM. How much are we talking about? Tax havens are costing the federal treasury, by one estimate, $100 billion a year.

Ready for the finish? Here are a ultra-high-resolution NASA computer model that has given scientists a stunning new look at how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere travels around the globe.

Like my father always said: Two things in life you can not avoid: paying taxes and taking a shit. Apparently not true. Should be: Two things in life you can not avoid: paying taxes & cooperations and their CEOs just laughing out loud at us.